DELL NON-HELL (CONT’D): Following up on my post from the other day, reader Bruce Hamilton emails:

Thought I’d give you another good non-hell story about Dell. My brother’s wife’s Dell had a failing hard drive. I’m the families tech support, so I braced myself for multiple phone calls from what to rescue from the drive (it was dying, but not dead yet), to how to how to install the new drive and reload Vista. The computer was still under warranty, so the tech support guy in India mailed her a new drive with no fuss (!). That’s a surprise because companies typically demand it be completely broken first. Dell’s tech support in India then gave her a call (!) (same guy!) to let her know the new drive was on the way. When it did the next day, they called her again (!) to ask if she needed help installing it! They didn’t know that I had already told her how to hook it up. Well, lo and behold, the drive already contained a complete copy of Vista and all the drivers. All she had to do was turn it on and it started installing itself! What great service!

Since I don’t have a web site, I thought I’d write them some email of praise for their great tech support and thoughtful pre-loading of Vista and drivers on the replacement hard drive, but I wasn’t able to do so. Their one failing is to supply an email address that you don’t need a computer number and service number to write to. Spent 20 minutes on the site looking for one… Oh well, I guess that’s one failure we can live with.

Maybe somebody there will see this.

UPDATE: And they did: Dell’s Richard Binhammer wrote to say thanks for the feedback. On the other hand, a lot of people wrote in with bad stories about Dell, most of them very lengthy. But here’s a short one from reader Stu Wagner: “I won’t waste your time with the details, but I bought a high-end desktop from Dell and spent approx. 20 hours on the phone trying to fix it over a 10-day period (long-distance to India), never got it fixed and they were out of ideas, told them to come and get it, I was done. It took them three months to pick up a $3000 desktop. I now have a MacPro and have been very happy with it.”

AUTOBLOG: GM using bankruptcy to shirk responsibility for clunker mercury switches? “The Mercury Policy Project issued a press release earlier this week saying that GM ‘has reneged on a commitment to safely discard those switches so they don’t pollute our air and water’ by not funding ELVS since bankruptcy. This means that ELVS doesn’t have enough money to dismantle and dispose of the hundreds of pounds of mercury in the clunkers, 54 percent of which are GM vehicles.” It hasn’t reneged — it’s just dumped that commitment on a company that doesn’t have the money to do anything.

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE in Malaysia.

BIZARRE, toilet-themed restaurant.

PRECISION VOTING: A new dispatch from Michael Yon. Plus this: “The helicopter shortage is causing crippling delays in troop movements.”

BEWARE THE shrinking polar bear.

IN THE MAIL: From Harvey Silverglate, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. Some years ago I started on a project entitled Due Process When Everything Is A Crime. The gist was that since criminal law has expanded to the point where everyone is some sort of a felon, the real action is in the area of prosecutorial discretion — in choosing whom to prosecute from among this population-wide mass of the guilty — where, in fact, due process basically doesn’t apply. That suggests that maybe there should be some due-process limits on decisions to prosecute. I never got to it (my scholarly rangetop has so many back burners it must be a half-mile deep) but the issue continues to deserve attention

Along these lines, you might also see Gene Healy’s Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, and Angela Davis’s (no, not that Angela Davis) Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. It’s an issue that’s worthy of a lot of attention.

WILL OBAMA cut out on Afghanistan?

BUFFALO NEWS: Rangel Should Resign. “Charlie Rangel always has been an entertaining congressman. And not to damn him with faint praise, an effective one, too. But the New York City representative, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is having a problem with his numbers as they relate to the truth. He now can be neither entertaining nor effective. He needs to go. If he won’t, Speaker Nancy Pelosi needs to push him.”

Wall Street Journal: The Absent-Minded Chairman. “When normal people happen to ‘find’ their own money, it might mean a twenty left in a winter coat, or discovering change beneath the sofa cushions. But if you’re Charlie Rangel, it means doubling your net worth.”

Plus, Jail Time For Rangel?

RHUT ROH: Behold the fantasy Facebook ghost town! The New York Times meets those meddling kids. “In short a New York Times article, an article from The Newspaper of Record, is based entirely on a reporter talking to her chums.” Shocking, that.

HARRY REID: Kennedy’s death “going to help us” on health care.

I’d shout out “who killed the Kennedys?” but, well, you know. . . ..

GET A GRIP.

EDWARD VOORHEES: So how’s the Federal Reserve doing? “In other words, the value of the dollar remained extremely stable for 150 years, the Fed was created in order to ‘stabilize the value of the dollar,’ and the result has been a 95% devaluation of the dollar in less than 100 years following its creation.”

BRUCE BARTLETT ON THE REPUBLICANS: “I will know that the party is on the path to recovery when someone in a position of influence reaches out to former Republicans like me.”

PHIL BOWERMASTER: The Coupon Queen, the Safety Net, and the Future of Free.

POLITICO: Chris Dodd Says Obama Needs to “Step Up.”

“THAT WAS A GOOD ONE.”

CAROL SHEA-PORTER DOESN’T KNOW HOW MANY CZARS THERE ARE. Well, it’s hard to keep track. Maybe this will help.

HMM: Obamacare Fuels Surge of Grassroots Bucks for GOPers.

AMERICAN ROYALTY: A tale of two newspapers. “Glenn Greenwald is right. This nation might as well embrace royalty and be done with it. The only part I don’t get, is how he can get snarky about the fact that Jenna Bush just got a part-time TV gig, without once mentioning the colossal royal funeral we just witnessed or the subsequent succession struggle now starting to play out in the party of the little guy. Kennedy succession tea-leaf reading follows.”

APPARENTLY, HIS LAST WORDS WERE TWEETED: R.I.P., DJ AM.

ANDREW BREITBART: The End to Two Grim Fairy Tales.

IS “TEABAGGER” THE NEW “N-WORD?” No, but when I hear someone use it, I know that nothing they say on the subject is worth taking seriously. Either they’re deliberately using it as a sexual slur, or they’re too ignorant to be worth listening to.

UPDATE: Okay, there was supposed to be a link in this, but there’s not and now I can’t find the post it was supposed to link to. D’oh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ah, here it is.

THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND: Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter has constituent arrested for disrespect.

Thoughts on the Singularity.

Next California Governor: Tom Campbell?

Poll: 57% would replace entire Congress.

Feds looking forward to de-suburbanizing America?

Dems moving to cover for Charlie Rangel. But their patience is running out.

1,000 show up for Tucson Tea Party town hall meeting.

Heath Shuler says healthcare bill should start over from scratch.

Dog abuse that would chill Michael Vick’s blood. Or William Shatner’s.

Stephen Green visits Bikini Bottom.

MICKEY KAUS: “Is Christopher Hitchens really offering up the most ancient, cliched rationalization of infidelity in defense of his friends, Elizabeth and John Edwards?”